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It seems I am one of those in the tarpit. I think the problem for us engineering types is that there is so much bullshit around marketing, that it's offputting

• nedwin 9y ago
  Hiring for marketing is incredibly tough. I’ve yet to work with a marketer I would recommend. Re your situation I’m not sure there is much you can or should do with $300. It’s too small an amount to make a dent in any paid channels for sure. Hire a marketing/growth coach is probably the most cost effective way to spend a budget like that imho
  • libertyEQ 9y ago
    The way you and your parent comment are discussing "marketing" I would think would be more accurate to discuss as promotions/promoting. This is an example of killing the language, and it minimizes the nuance involved. Advertising and promotions are a subset of marketing. Edit: To be clear, I work in the area of addressable market/ /go-to-market strategy/ product definition/ competitive analysis and I have never had anything to do with outbound, promotional messaging.
    • valuearb 9y ago
      Not sure why this is being downvoted. Marketing involves a lot more than advertising. At my current job I mentioned my surprise that no one from marketing was embedded with our dev team and got a querulous response that “why would we someone from advertising or PR in our dev process?” My response was that marketing encompasses both designing and selling products that meet customer needs. We needed a product manager who does the customer research to help us determine our target customers and to build the right product to meet their needs and wants, and who will design a marketing plan with the relative priorities of advertising, PR, promotions, and various sales channels (direct, reseller, etc) to most efficiently reach target customers with an always limited marketing budget. As an aside: What can be a thousand times more efficient than Google AdWords or any advertising ever? Good PR. No one should ever spend a dime on advertising without first considering whether they have a compelling story that media outlets will publicize for free, with just the cost of a dedicated or even part time PR resource. I spent $1,500 on a PR contractor for my 2nd app, with 3 months I had positive reviews in PC World, CBS Marketwatch, etc, and my highest sales ever. In the end I’d estimate his efforts produced at 20-40x his cost in revenues. I’m dumb enough that I never did it again.
      • ac2u 9y ago
        How would one normally go about finding a freelance PR contractor? Are there any particular online directories? I ask because from your description they seem like they've different tactics to the typical freelance marketer.
  • freehunter 9y ago
    $300 buys a lot of gas or train rides. You could even buy a new pair of walking shoes, and get out the door to talk to customers face-to-face. It's scary out there, but actually speaking to people to get signups is cheap/free, and something really only a startup can do since you're not going to get huge numbers from it. I'm struggling to find a single startup concept where you couldn't be served by walking through your city and finding a potential customer. If one exists, they're probably targeting the wrong customers.
    • danenania 9y ago
      I think it depends a lot on your product how effective this will be. I did a lot of this while EnvKey[1] was in beta, setting up in person interviews/meetings via my network, and while I did learn a lot from it, it didn't lead to getting many users. This was primarily an issue of timing: EnvKey is a tool for managing configuration and secrets, so the most natural time to adopt it is when you're starting a new project. It has an import feature, but convincing someone to import an existing project is just a much higher bar than convincing them to try it on something new. The problem is: what percentage of companies happen to be starting a new project now or even in the next few weeks? There are plenty of them out there, but the odds of getting someone at the right moment when reaching out one by one in meatspace are too low to make it work. In this situation, I've found that a hybrid approach works better: use organic marketing, meetups, and conferences to cast a net that is sufficiently wide that at least some of the people that see it and like the concept are in a position to adopt it right away, then keep in touch to find out how it's going and what the blockers are. This has been effective for getting our first batch of happy production users. 1 - https://www.envkey.com https://www.envkey.com
      • freehunter 9y ago
        Yeah, just walking into a supermarket and expecting to find a B2B connection is unlikely, but like you said, walking into a convention where your likely customers are is a great opportunity. Even coupling that with the other guys suggestion of just taping fliers everywhere outside the convention or dropping business cards on tables in the entryway lets you skip buying tickets to the convention but still get some boost from it. $300 will get you pretty damn far that way, enough to get a customer or two that you will hopefully be able to provide good enough first-class service that they'll help you from there.
• rcavezza 9y ago
  I like your comment and a lot of your thoughts are common. Allow me to help alleviate some of your concerns. I think the root of the issue is that many "Startup Tarpits" are not talking to the right customers early on. I also think you have only worked with marketing people who didn't use a methodical, scientific approach to user acquisition. Don't hire a marketing expert. This is a bad first step. You should define a very specific subset of customers and talk to them. Find out their problems after talking to 10 very targeted people that fit into a user profile. I recommend reading "The Mom Test" (it's a book about how to phrase customer development interview questions) as a basis for how you talk to potential customers. User acquisition efforts are not only measurable on a larger scale. You may have this idea because the people you worked with may have had a big company background. For a startup, it is very necessary for your advertising campaign to define a cost per click, find a conversion rate, and then test many different advertising phrases and avenues. This helps put a direct cost per user acquisition price on each campaign and you can compare apples to apples. It takes "voodoo money burning rituals" and turns it into numbers that are measurable. If you rely on free marketing channels without a clear focus on who is using your product, it is very likely that you have 10 customers who fit 10 completely different segments with 10 different ideas of which features will give them value. They key is learning. When you estimate future software releases, you typically point a story using things you have learned from previous, similar stories. When you attempt a new advertising campaign, you should use past learnings to determine which ads and messaging will work for different segments - how much they will cost, and how many users you can expect to get based on past results. In summation, startup marketing should have a focused, scientific, numbers driven, methodical approach - just like writing software. If your marketers are not doing that, you probably aren't working with the right marketers.
  • j_s 9y ago
    The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you https://amzn.com/dp/B01H4G2J1U https://amzn.com/dp/B01H4G2J1U (2016, 4+ stars, 43 reviews, $9.99)
• k__ 9y ago
  Well, you can do baby steps. There are so many ways to promote stuff. For example content marketing. Start writing a blog, when you get the ins and outs of blogging, start to use it to promote your product. This year I wrote a blog article almost every week. Then I started to promote some educational videos I recorded for Skillshare. Made a few bucks on the side with that. Just focus on some "type" of marketing that is easy for your and try it.
• danenania 9y ago
  In my experience (this is something I'm in the midst of and still working on), the key to early low-budget marketing is establishing a feedback cycle. More important than reaching large numbers is gauging the reaction across a reasonable cross-section of the market. Apart from figuring out what's working and what isn't, it's also critical for zeroing in on who your early adopters will be. Ads are an anonymous and low-touch acquisition channel, making them great for growing once you've got product-market fit, and (mostly) terrible before that point. If you're really clever with AB testing, analytics, lifecycle emails, etc., you may be able to get some useful info out of an ad campaign, but I think it's unlikely to be cost effective compared to higher touch options like networking, cold emails, posting on forums, meetups, conferences, etc. where it's easier to establish a line of communication and find out what people really think. I don't think this is something you can hire for. Honestly, while it has its moments when things are going well, overall it's just not very fun work. It's tedious, frequently discouraging, and puts you in a lot of uncomfortable situations. It takes founder-level motivation to push through. Once you've done the hard work and have the machine running, there are tons of people who will be happy to scale and optimize it for money. Before that, I think a co-founder is probably the only realistic option if you're looking for someone to completely own early-stage marketing.
• rsp1984 9y ago
  The problem is that you think about marketing from the end rather than from the beginning. Spending money with FB or Google is one possible end. Another one would be inbound / content marketing. Another one would be trade shows. Etc. However the beginning of marketing is researching how your product interacts with the market, which problem your product solves and for whom. A lot of times who you think your customers are isn't really who your customers are and why you think they buy your product isn't really why they buy it. And many times your product is capable of solving a problem for a much larger user group which however you just don't know about yet (but should definitely find out about). Getting all these variables right is how marketing starts and besides your own time it doesn't cost you a dime. Once you have better knowledge about the market (who you target, at which price point, with what message, etc..) you will have a much better feeling on how to target that market and spending actual dollars on a marketing end (ads etc.) at that point will feel much more satisfying and less "voodoo".
• jwr 9y ago
  Replying to myself, after 11h. There is a good number of replies, and they mostly underscore my point: I do not know how to deal with the problem and there is no defined way to go about it. Most replies focus on "talking to your customers", validating your idea, etc. I know, you should talk to your customers. It's all good. I do. But this won't get you out of the tarpit. Talking to your customers mostly gets you new feature requests, so you end up building new features. Also, once you have a business with a bunch of paying customers, the situation is different. You know the product can sell. If you can get 10 paying customers, you can also get 100, and probably 1000, too. That was what the original article was about. There was precious little practical advice in the comments, apart from "content marketing" and guerilla marketing. One is something pretty much everybody does, and the other is difficult to pull out for B2B. libertyEQ has a great point: we know so little about the whole subject that we even don't get the naming right. Sorry. For the moment I'll just keep calling all this stuff "marketing", until I understand it better. My original point still stands: the article got it right, and the reason why we hackers build features instead of doing marketing is because marketing is hard, poorly defined, and there is so much fluff, myths and cliches around it. I'm still looking for a solution.
  • ddebernardy 9y ago
    If talking to your clients mostly gets you new feature requests, it either means your product isn't adequate yet or you're not asking the right questions. In a nutshell you want to get of feel of: - What was going on in your clients' heads before they found you. What precise problem were they trying to solve. This'll give you insights on whether or not your product is adequate, and on how to phrase your landing page. - How they went about to look for you. What google search they did, whether they checked out reviews and how, etc. this is to better focus your SEO and adwords campaigns. - What their decision process looked like. Was it a single person making the call, or were several people involved? What objections got raised? What were their key decision criteria? Raise them in your sales copy or in drip emails. - Are they talking about your product? Would they? This is to help you spot segments with viral potential. Don't forget to politely ask for referrals if applicable. - And, of course, feedback on the product itself. But don't spend too much time on this, and don't promise anything or build expectations.
• ExcitedByNoise 9y ago
  Resources are obviously a constraint, but in my opinion the "right person, right time, right message" thinking is the best thing our marketing team taught me. We used to run paid social/adwords campaigns, but once we were able to identify segments and customize the message, we ran smaller, more targeted campaigns. I don't think having huge campaigns is as needed as figuring out your customers and how the present your product in a way they are ready to receive it. We initially didn't have as much data to help us understand our segments, but we got a marketer that really had amazing intuition and experience. She was able to help us develop these targeted campaigns before we had the resources to really invest in better marketing software and bigger campaign budgets. Many months we spend less than $300 on paid adverts and we're growing our customers and revenue. We've also got many good customer who advocate for us.